Marketing's biggest shift: stop overvaluing yesterday

Executive overview

Marketing is the engine of business, but most companies are wasting money on dying channels while ignoring where attention has actually moved. The internet has hit maturity. Attention is fragmenting faster than most marketers can track.

The opportunity is in the gap: platforms like Facebook Reels have massive audiences but almost no supply of content, making them cheap and effective right now. Ego and nostalgia are the enemy — not the platforms.

The biggest marketing mistake is letting subjective opinion override data.

Where attention has moved

• TV outside sports is being gutted by streaming; commercials are effectively dead for most audiences
• Even audiences watching cable are on their phones when ads run
• Facebook Reels: huge viewership, almost no content creators — a major supply-demand imbalance
• TikTok and Instagram Reels dominate mindshare but are already competitive; Facebook is the underpriced opportunity

The money being wasted

• Traditional channels (newspapers, TV) are raising prices as audiences shrink
• Programmatic banner ads (e.g. ESPN.com) get almost no real attention
• Influencer marketing ROI varies wildly — a $5,000 spend can return nothing; an $800 spend can outperform it
• The ROI of any tool depends entirely on who's using it, not the tool itself

The ego and data problem

• Most CMOs make creative decisions based on personal taste, not performance data
• Post-publish quant and qual data should drive decisions — not pre-publish opinion
• Social media "not working" is nearly always an execution problem, not a platform problem
• People choose visible brand vanity (TV spots they can see at a baseball game) over invisible but effective digital spend